- Definition 0 [ www.philosophypages.com ]
:
Branch of metaphysics concerned with identifying, in the most
general terms, the kinds of things that actually exist. Thus,
the "ontological commitments" of a philosophical position
include both its explicit assertions and its implicit presuppositions
about the existence of entities, substances, or beings of particular
kinds.
Ontos = Greek for ‘being’
Ontology = the study of being.
- Definition 1 [ Tom
Gruber ] :
An ontology is a specification of a conceptualization.
- Definition 2 [ www.ontology.org ]
:
The main purpose of an ontology is to enable communication between
computer systems in in a way that is independent of the individual
system technologies, information architectures and application
domain.
The key ingredients that make up an ontology are a vocabulary
of basic terms and a precise specification of what those terms
mean.
The term 'ontology' has been used in this way for a number of
years by the artificial intelligence and knowledge representation
community, but is now becoming part of the standard terminology
of a much wide community including object modelling and XML.
An ontology is more than an agreed vocabulary
An ontology provides a set of well-founded constructs that can
be leveraged to build meaningful higher level knowledge. The terms
in an ontology are selected with great care, ensuring that the
most basic (abstract) foundational concepts and distinctions are
defined and specified. The terms chosen form a complete set, whose
relationship one to another is defined using formal techniques.
It is these formally defined relationships that provide the semantic
basis for the terminology chosen.
An ontology is more than a taxonomy or classification of terms
Although taxonomy contributes to the semantics
of a term in a vocabulary, ontologies include richer relationships
between terms. It is these rich relationships that enable the
expression of domain-specific knowledge, without the need to include
domain-specific terms.
In agent based systems, such as proposed for next generation electronic
commerce, the adoption of a shared ontology allows commerce agents
to simultaneously:
- interoperate without
misunderstanding,
- retain a high
degree of autonomy, flexibility and agility.
Commerce agents
can therefore be highly adaptable yet are able to meaningfully
communicate domain-specific knowledge. They do this by using only
the basic terms and relationships defined in the ontology. It
is the precise definitions of the basic terms that allows those
terms to be combined to form meaningful higher level knowledge.
- Definition 3 [B.
Andersen - www.ontologyworks.com ] :
An ontology is a model of information in a given domain that can
be used for many purposes, including
enterprise integration, database design, information retrieval,
and information interchange on the World
Wide Web. Ontology is a very recent development in computer science
that promises to overcome many
traditional problems in the areas mentioned above and more.
The term “an ontology” has its origin in the philosophical
study of Ontology. As the names suggest, the
two terms are related – it is the philosophical inspiration
of Ontology that makes the emerging field of
ontology in IT so different from approaches to these traditional
problems taken in the past.
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